Your DevOps Lead Doesn’t Scale: How PaaS Enables the Agile Enterprise

Virtualization gives new powers to enterprise, making it easy for developers to deploy applications to the cloud. The concept of limitless cloud resources is alluring. Maybe too alluring. Faced with the open expanse of (virtual) real estate, your developers will build. And deploy. And build again. And deploy again. .

That’s not a bad thing. With scalable virtualization, your developers can easily push dozens, hundreds, thousands of applications to the cloud, easily and conveniently and fast. And your DevOps has to manage all that data. And that’s where scalability can become a headache, at least for your DevOps lead. Who, by the way, does not scale.

The Devil in the Details But it is still up to DevOps to implement cloud computing in the enterprise, and your DevOps lead is not a superhero. DevOps staff must constantly juggle assets for each deployable application, struggle to maintain uptime, and—in the case of private cloud infrastructure—frantically provision new cloud infrastructure. It’s easy for devs to push apps to the cloud, but DevOps leads still have to administer all these apps, a daunting challenge. Mozilla web operations engineer Chris Turra puts it this way: “We are able to do things quickly, but on the infrastructure side, it means a lot of man-hours, and there is a lot of duplicated effort.”

Crippling administrative minutiae make the cloud promise fall short. Your DevOps lead gets stuck with yak-shaving—tedious, mundane tasks that must be completed before productive, value-added work can even begin. Common yak-shaving work includes configuring support software, setting up databases or web servers, installing language runtimes (including module dependencies), and more. In extreme examples, DevOps leads must perform these tedious tasks every time a new application is deployed.

Private Platform as a Service to the Rescue Private Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the antidote to yak-shaving. Private PaaS is a cloud middleware layer that automates those tedious scaling and setup tasks, allowing your enterprise to easily scale management and resources. With PaaS, your DevOps lead is Reed Richards, stretching to accommodate the application management needs of the enterprise.

With private PaaS, DevOps—and more importantly, developers—can focus on the work at hand without the distractions of administrivia. It’s not uncommon for enterprise private PaaS adopters to be able to launch thirty applications into the cloud in amount of time it used to take to launch and manage just one.

Private PaaS introduces an additional layer of abstraction for your DevOps lead, making configuration tasks repeatable. Private PaaS employs a management layer, unifies the applications, and presents them in a manageable form. The tedious work is abstracted, and performed behind the scenes between the developer that creates the application and the system that provides the automation. Your DevOps lead oversees tasks at hand and manages a cluster of servers that provides all the services for a pool of users. That’s a lot more constructive facilitation than setting up an individual application stack with every deployment.

Profiles in DevOps For K.J. Woolley, our SysAdmin here at ActiveState, deploying web applications used to be arduous. “Installing apps on a typical web server meant chasing down dependencies and bugs, and frequently running after the people who had developed the apps to ask questions,” says Woolley. “This was a very inefficient, time-consuming model.”

To improve workflow, Woolley set up a private-PaaS platform to support internal applications, and empowered developers to deploy applications to the cloud. “As a SysAdmin, I wasn’t deeply familiar with the dependencies and inner workings of these various applications,” he notes. Woolley contacted team developers and asked them to push their authored apps on the cluster he had just created. “It took only four hours to set up the cluster and push the four applications we needed,” Woolley explains. “The developers have the confidence to push and maintain their applications as needed while Ops like myself remain in control of the platform.”

In the end, Woolley’s PaaS initiative reduced deployment workloads and accelerated workflow. Private PaaS clearly demarcates the authority of developers. While developers have unlimited freedom within their application containers and are able to use the resources allotted to them, the DevOps remain in control of those allotted resources.

Mozilla’s Turra took a similar approach, and recently implemented private PaaS: “We were looking for a way to scale out our environments without having to add more people,” he says. “That was a big driver for us to look at PaaS.”

Mozilla implemented private PaaS to deploy web applications at scale, and that has enabled Turra’s teams to achieve real velocity. “I get excited about not being a barrier to our developers,” Turra says. “I don’t want to be deploying code or managing those kinds of assets when I don’t see the need, and I think a PaaS gets us there.”